Medieval 2 Total War

After having played Rome 2 and Shogun 2 on Steam, both of which have made me incredibly annoyed with the games and also with Steam because of their lack of ability to read my main graphics card on my laptop, I have come back to the game that got me in to the Total War series.

Medieval 2 felt like it was an amazingly huge game when I first started playing it, that may be because it allows you to play as one of a number of countries during this era of western history from Britain, down past France and Spain to the top of Africa, across to Jerusalem and up to Russia, which constitutes the entire map.

So, when you first start you get to choose from a small subsection of the countries, after having completed a short campaign and finishing the objectives (Or a long campaign if you want to play as a starting nation) you can go through again and choose who you want to play as, almost to the extent where it feels a bit like FIFA where you can play as a 1st division team and try and get in to the premiership.

Ruling your kingdom is relatively streamlined, there are a few bits of micromanagement, for example you need to do taxes and the like, but only if you have a general in the city who can rule as a duke/baron, but if you don't then it will just go to auto tax unless you change it, which is nice because it allows you to just focus on building your empire or building your army, if that's your thing.

Moving on from the army, we can navigate directly to the combat, which actually functions like a real battlefield and army manager and simulator, for example, if the battlefield is covered in snow then your troops will get cold, move slower and the like, if it begins to rain then you will not be able to use archers as effectively and so on, which makes choosing the correct battlefield and correct weather to attack just as important as choosing the right troops.

This means that you can use the environment to your advantage, like positioning your archers on top of a hill whilst your enemies try and climb it whilst your light cavalry attacks from the flanks, which feels incredibly satisfying when done correctly.

Your troops also get tired, for example sending a unit of dismounted feudal knights running and screaming in to close combat like football hooligans on a night out might sound like the best form of attack, but you have to make sure that you haven't left too big a distance between you and the enemy so your men aren't shattered by the time they close the distance and hit like pensioners on sedatives.

Now, I understand that some people might prefer to do a campaign as the Romans, or the Oda clan from Rome or Shogun respectively, but to be fair, those 2 games have annoyed me, and secondly I am a big fan of medieval Europe, massively so, which is why, regardless of how long it has been since I last played it, I can slip back in to Medieval 2 and play as someone like Portugal easily, almost like slipping on a pair of comfortable shoes.

However, to the bad parts.

I hate the religion part of the game....that might just be a personal quibble but it's a pretty big one, but it can develop a major thing for you if you become excommunicated by the Vatican or have a jihad placed upon you, especially if you have a lot of generals who view being pious as a disease that needs to be destroyed. 

The AI from the enemy can be at times a little dim, I.E. sending a unit of horsemen around the flank and hitting the enemy in the rear can be amazing, but only if the AI picks up that it is having it's face torn off and responds accordingly, not standing around picking it's noise as my horsemen smash them in their faces with maces.

But those are the two small niggles that I have for an altogether fantastic title that I have been playing for years and will continue to.

Pros and cons:

Pro's

-Fantastic Battle System

-Great management system for your empire

-Moving around the map without actually doing anything can be a pleasure due to the gorgeous map

-The TBS part where you move around the map has FOW, which is really nice to have.

Con's

-I hate the religion system because I hate religion in general, but that's just me, I want to walk around a kick someone's teeth in without worrying if they have been invited to afternoon tiffin at the Pope's gaffe.

-AI can be thick on occasion.

Dredd

Harken to me peons and peasants, it is I, your God and master who has returned from the perils of the warp to lead you further as your God-Emperor, further in to this great and terrible time we call the future.

*Ahem*, now that I have that out of the way, here's my review on Judge Dredd.

Now then, if you haven't seen this film yet, you and I are going to fall out very fucking quickly, because I like this film, this film brought me out of the depressing haze of Iron Man 3 and certain sections of The Avengers (Yes it was a pretty good film, but if you try and tell me that S.H.I.E.L.D.  Was accurately depicted there then I am going to come around to your house and piss behind your sofa and put piri piri sauce on your toilet seat.)

So then, in this film we step in to the bullet ridden boots and pipe dented helmet of Judge Dredd in Mega City-One, whilst on a regular day in the job.

Before I go any further in to this review I want to tell people who are die-hard Dredd fans that they may not like this, but I liked this because of some of the slight differences between this Dredd-U and the regular Dredd-U, because it actually makes the city of Mega City-One feel more dilapidated and getting fucked up.

First of all, there is no Psy-division in this universe, Judge Anderson is pretty much a fuck up of a judge who is being given her last chance at becoming one because she is the most powerful psychic in the city and the chief judges have decided that they need her.....not sure why, the use of say for example Judge Rico (The clone of Dredd not his Brother), might have been a little bit better and would have made it a little more exciting.

Now then, Peach Trees is a self contained city come sky scraper which is being controlled by Ma-Ma and her gang, when she kills 3 people who were selling drugs on her turf she skins them alive and throws them over the balcony using Slo-Mo (I'll come back to that later), whereupon Aderson chooses that they go there and begin her testing.

From there things go from relatively alright from a judge's point of view to worse, to fucked over a bramble patch when the entirety of the city decends upon them like vultures upon a carcass, or rugby fans at the pub.

The technical aspects of this film and camera aspects of this piece are absolutely beautiful, and that is me being genuinely serious, the use of Slo-Mo is something that I have been wanting to see something similar to in a film for some time, the scene slows down, the colours become so much more vivid and even when a bullet slaps through someones' cranium it looks genuinley balletic.

Ma-Ma is quite a good villain, and is someone that I enjoyed watching just to see what she would do next to try and kill the judges, and the use of an old plot point from the Judge Dredd comics was a really nice twist I can imagine that some people who don't read comic's or Dredd were surprised to see that.

Overall I think that this film was an awful lot better than the Sly Stallone one, but I think that trapping my bollocks in a vice would be better than that.

Points of Good :

-Dredd doesn't take off his helmet 
-The difference in aesthetics of the costumes looks a lot better than the regular Dredd uniform.
-The Lawgiver handgun actually looks a lot more brutal and intimidating than the original Lawgiver, but also looks like it could work in reality compared to the Mk 2.


Points of Bad :
-Lawmaster looks a tad stupid compared to the comic version.
-I don't like Olivia Thrilby's acting in this film but that might just be me.
-Would have been good if they would have actually used more Judges and gone more in to the laws but hey, if you people will go out and buy the DVD's then maybe we can get a sequel out of this.

Doom 3: BFG Edition

Ahhhh Doom, id software's big number from back in the 2.5D era, and one of the big games that everyone still remembers...well if you weren't a spod when everyone else was playing this masterpiece, and now id has brought out the BFG edition to make my trousers tight and my journalistic gonads churn with anticipation.

So then, we step back in to the very comfortable boots of the "Doomguy" to wade through the legions of demons that stand between you and the Cyberdemon....and of course there is doom 2 and 3, so yeah it's pretty good.

Okay, so then, the original Doom, Doom 2 and Doom 3, along with the expansions and also a couple of extra levels for the original 2 games to pad the game out a little...that and get you some interesting stuff for completing those levels (Xbox is what I got it for, so avatar stuff for me!)

Doom 3 now actually handles with common sense, for those amongst us who never played the original Doom 3, I refer to the fact that you couldn't use a gun and a torch at the same time, I like the fact that I can have a torch when I am shooting at a guy....though I would have enjoyed having a rifle sight aswell, but thats just me.

 So then, there isn't much that needs to be said about the original Doom games, you ran, you killed, you got to the end of the level and moved on, getting progressively bigger weapons and going up against progressively badder asses.

Doom 3 wasn't really changed either, you get the flashlight mounting on your body armour, you still can't aim down the barrel of the gun to allow for more accurate fire, but that's just a little nit pick of mine, and to be fair it doesn't really change all that much.

Pros and Cons.

Pros
-It's Doom.
-I missed old fashioned shooting games
-I can carry around more than 2 guns...which is nice

Cons.
-Oh god the pixels....

If you liked this then you might also like
-Quake
-Rage
-Most other FPS games that aren't really realistic.

Preview : Metro: Last Light

Metro 2033 was a fantastic game, and one of the few games I regret trading in for the cavalcade of mediocrity that was Skyrim.



And now they are releasing Metro 2034 and everyone who reads this can colour me excited, now with this trailer that was recently released I find myself wishing more and more that I could pick up my Bastard and head outside into the frozen wastes of Moscow.

I felt that Metro 2033 got a lot of undeserved stick, I found it to be extremly intruiging as a concept and as a storyline, namely due to the fact that I wasn't in America now and the story had more depth than a spoon...Also I didn't run around with people calling me "The Chosen One" or the "Lone Wanderer"....also it was Fucking DIFFICULT!

Now to my friends I am one of the few people who actually enjoys playing Dark Souls, and I love playing games which make me put more effort into them and force me to concentrate...for one thing Metro doesn't actually have a HUD system, and there is no health bar, to find out how you are doing you have to listen to your heartbeat, which adds another dynamic.

Imagine if you will, walking down a set of stairs, you get attacked, you panic unload a clip into whatever is attacking you, but not before it takes off about half of your health, and now you have to go into the bowels of a train stationin the dark, with only your helmet mounted flashlight and your Bastard assault rifle for company...all the while you can hear your own heartbeat telling you that you are injured.

As an action game it was relatively average, but with certain nice little details, though as a horror and a survival game it is right up there near the top in my opinion because it makes you think, makes you worry about yourself and above all, makes you strategise about your surroundings and how to survive by planning, something that I truly love.

I am looking forward to this game so much it's untrue, I would recommend you buy/replay Metro 2033, I am going to pick it up at some stage today or tomorrow.

Daredevil Reborn

The first person who made me sit up and take notice of Daredevil, was Brian Michael Bendis,before that I wrote Matt Murdock as the blind man who can see, but, having read Bendis' long lasting arc of the man without fear, I was soon turned into a Daredevil Fan.

So then, Daredevil Reborn, the story which leads on from the Shadowland arc, and shows us all what Mr Matt Murdock has been up to since last we saw him, when he kicked himself in between the legs so that he could evict the unwanted tennant of the Hand.

Now then, Matt Murdock; Former Lawyer, Former Superhero and current vagrant.

If you didn't read Shadowland, the crossover comic from Marvel in 2010, I would recommend reading it now, namely for the facts of, I found it to be an interesting read and it shows that any character is fallable, and also it was quite well written and serves as the basis for Daredevil Reborn.

The story takes place some time after Shadowland, and serves as the way to get Matt Murdock from loner and vagrant, moving on from town to town without spending much time anywhere, back into the role of Daredevil, the man without fear and superhero of Hell's Kitchen.

This trade paperback reminded me alot of Green Lantern Rebirth, the Geoff Johns 6-issue mini series that DC produced to get Hal Jordan back to being a Green Lantern and away from Parallax and the Spectre, the trade paperback was alright, a lot of people didn't like it because of the fact that there wasn't a lot of action and it was mainly an introspective on Hal Jordan, and I feel that this is going to go the same way.

But, although I do like both of those story lines, and how they manage to get their respective characters back on track, I felt that Daredevil Reborn was a little bit rushed.

The overall storyline was very good, though I feel that flushing out the character of Calavera, and also making Matt Murdock's soul searching more of a character focus compared to him doing detective work.

How could they have improved the story line?

An idea that I had when I was reading this trade paperback was that you could have the entire story with Matt doing his soul searching in a leafy suburb of somewhere like...I don't know, San Diego, while he feels he is going insane because of what happened during Shadowland, with a mutant character hired by....Owl? Fisk? Putting subtle mental suggestions into Murdock's head to make him slowly go off kilter, like what happened when Mysterio tried it on with him.

This would make his mental stability and him coming back to Hells Kitchen and his mantel of Daredevil more of a definitive and long lasting ending, rather than him suddenly turning around to the blind child that "He had been running from his demons, he understood that now".

I can understand what is meant by this and why the comic went in this direction, but there was a possibility here to make a comic book trade that was more of a psychological commentary on superheros who are just normal people and even super powered individuals, this comic book could have had more of a deep and meaningful look into the psyche of Matt Murdock and how becoming Daredevil has changed his personality and his view on the world for the better or for the worse.

But that is what we have to wonder, should we be dumbing down the comic books that we read? Or should we be asking for something that has less tits and violence and has more; political intrigue, psychological depth or covers things that people don't want to necessarily think about E.G. sex slavery, prostitution etc, which I feel I am just naming arc's from Garth Ennis' Punisher MAX series and EX Machina.

I feel like I am rambling on about this but I think that we as a group of people who read this medium should have more choice in terms of the subject matters that we read, because if I want to read something that covers politics, I have to read EX Machina, if I want to look into the seedy underbelly of society, I either go out around Manchester or I read Punisher MAX, and I want for us to have more choice other than to read the same old same old.

Ultimately, I recommend Daredevil Reborn and I really enjoyed it, I just wanted to make a point that I feel is going in the comic book business at the moment, also I pretty much glossed over the artwork and I feel that I should comment on that, the cover's by Jock were fantastic as was the artwork, and they functioned really well in Daredevil and I feel that this artwork would be great for any non-powered superhero

The Pros and the Cons

Pros
-Great Artwork
-Good Storyline
-Interesting plot twists.


Cons
- I feel that Diggle missed out on something but that's me and that is in hindsight.

If you liked this you might also like.
-Green Lantern: Rebirth.
-Hellblazer: Tainted Love
-The Losers

Transformers: More than meets the eye Trade 1

I never watched Transformers when I was growing up, in fact the first bit of transformers I was introduced to was when someone I knew borrowed me a VHS (Fuck I feel old) of the original animated film in which Hasbro had decided to kill off most of their toy line to make way for new toys and miniatures.

Since I started reading comics I never had a thought cross my mind that went along the lines of "I think I will read a Transformers trade paperback today" namely because I never really got the appeal that the series made to people, because I was always under the impression that the only reason why the TV series was made alongside the toys was because Hasbro wanted children's money and devised the TV series and toys so that children could play with them  and act out the scenes on the screen.

What I didn't realise was that at 21 years of age I would be so enamoured over a trade paperback, one concerning the trials and tribulations of the people of Cybertron, after the war which had devastated their world, without Optimus Prime and Megatron.

When I started reading this trade paperback, I was forced to by a friend of mine when I was staying on his sofa, whilst this is not the best way to start reading a comic book, I still found the comic book to be highly engaging, darkly witty and packed with information, plot and characterisation.

 From what I have concluded, having read the trade paperback cover to cover at least 5 times, is that I like the new creative direction that James Roberts, Nick Roche and Alex Milne have taken the Transformers universe in, namely because they gave the characters in this story more personality than they have ever had, even Ultra Magnus' lack of a personality actually works like a personality.

The death of Optimus Prime, which is at the start of this trade paperback, is also very intruiging, and shows us what the other people on Cybertron think of the Autobots and the Decepticons, namely in the way that means you get a lot of political intruige and backstabbing from other characters.

The artwork in this comic series is fantastic, in fact the artist gets so much personality out of
the characters, I actually think that there is more character and personality in the faces of robots than in some human characters.

I fully recommend this comic and feel that everyone should read this because of the fact that this comic series shows that any comic series can be revived by thinking about what makes the majority of people shy away from the product that you are trying to sell to them, in this case, a convaluted mess of back history that was cut away by ditching the 2 people that made it hard to get into.

Pros and Cons for this 

Pros
-Fantastic Storytelling
-Amazing artwork
-Interesting characters with inruiging personalities and flaws
-A good way for new fans to get into Transformers.
-The comic has lots of little details in the background that you may find after reading through it again.

Cons
 -Some characters look very similar making it difficult to differentiate.
- A couple of plot points are slightly fragile, but apart from that Grade A.

If you liked this then you might also like.
-Last stand of the Wreckers (Another James Roberts trade, he was co-writer on it.)
-Ex Machina (A good trade, has a lot of political intruige and has a number of characters with believability.)
-Captain Britian and MI13 (We only got 3 trades before it got cancelled *fist shake* but stellar, great cast, personality and belivable story arcs.)

Resident Evil 6

I liked Leon S Kennedy's campaign in Resident Evil 6.

I absolutely abhore sections of the rest of the game, including the other campaigns and the writing.

So then, after the Leon S. Kennedy review that I published yesterday on this site, I decided that I should continue from there and outline my thoughts on what Resident Evil 6 did badly after the fairly decent campaign that was Leons.

First things first, the story, Leon's was very well written and actually felt like a call back to the old Resident Evil series of games (I.E. like resident evil 1,2 or 3), whereas, in Chris' campaign the story was lackluster, and was more akin to a 3rd person zombie call of duty game with dodgy dialogue and ridiculous bosses that genuinely made me laugh when I looked at them...not that I didn't do that in Leon's campaign because Capcom still cant get around the need to make everything bigger, like the ballet dinosaur.

Jake's story was a bit contrived, it was the general pastiche of "Here is character A, only he can help us to save the world!" which always makes me nauseous because of the lack of creative design that the writers for games have nowadays, that and the main bad guy who was made out to be like Nemesis from Resident Evil 3, wasn't scary in the slightest, he was just annoying, over the top and in dire need of killing off half way through to bring in something else that was hard as nails...maybe his goatee sporting brother perhaps?

Carrying on from the storyline we have characterisation, something that this game tried to do for its characters in these campaigns and failed to do, namely because people, like me, who had played Resident Evil games previous to this, understood the characters, and also what these people did.

Coming in first, Chris Redfield and his life partner Piers, Chris is a former member of the Raccoon police department S.T.A.R.S. team, but is currently working for the B.S.A.A. to put down bioweapons and stop bioterrorism, something that he has apparently forgotten by this 6th installment as he attempts to channel Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, which means that all the characterisation that they put into the man is now gone....at least he looks relatively feasable as a human being now though

Yeah, he looked like a man who had started smuggling melons in his arms.

Piers seemed to me to be a smart and down to earth character, a man who had a slight amount of hero worship over Chris, but wasn't afraid to tell him his opinion which was something that I liked when I was playing through the game and Chris was being an idiot.

Jake is very well characterised, I like him mainly because he feels like an actual human being compared to all of the usual protagonists we get in games who save the world because it's right.
Not for Jake, he has his priorities sorted out, because even if he does save the world, he needs to get paid afterwards, namely because of the fact that you cant buy chinese take out on your reputation....unless you're Wilson Fisk I suppose.

Sherry Birkin was a nice addition to the game because I haven't heard anything about her since Resi 2.

Okay, so I've covered the characters and their storylines, now lets move on to the things that annoyed me, the plot related set pieces, I.E. the point where I was playing as Jake, and the helicopter I was in was getting trashed as was beginning to head towards the ground quicker than a hookers knickers. At which point the guy in the helicopter with me said "Jump to the other chopper!" now then, in a chinook, side by side with another chinook, both of which are level, jumping between one and the other would be DAMN NEAR FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE EVEN IF YOU WERE ON THE FUCKING GROUND AND STATIONARY NOT IN A MOVING HELICOPTER ABOVER A 500 FOOT DROP!

Okay, whilst that is only one example, I remember there being more, but they have obviously been blanked from my mind, thank you for reading this watch for my next review.

In conclusion

Pro's

-The game still had the same gameplay and streamlined controls
-Weapons felt like they did some hefty damage and were actually useful

Cons

-Partners
-Set Pieces
-Certain voice acting segments grate
- Storylines become annoying because of their obviousness

If you liked this you might also like

Resident  Evil 4....because it's better
Half Life 2...It's not even remotely similar but it's far superior to Resident Evil 6